and constraint. I cannot in this place do more than remind the reader of the antiquity of three of the most notable of these dramatic travesties: the Feast of Fools, the election of the Boy Bishop, and the Feast of the Ass. The first of these was celebrated on the Continent as early as 1182, one may say with reasonable certainty, 990. It is indeed more than a conjecture that the Feasts of Fools and the Ass inherited the license of the Roman Saturnalia, the season and spirit of which were assimilated by the Christian Feast of the Nativity. Whether adopted by the church in its effort to conciliate paganism, or tolerated for reasons of secular policy, these mock-religious festivals were soon the Frankenstein of Christianity; and it was doubtless against them rather than the seductions of the sacred drama that most of the ecclesiastical prohibitions of the Middle Ages were aimed. With its necessary comic accessories, the Feast of Fools was well established in England before 1226, and it was still flourishing in 1390 when Courtney forbade its performance in London. "The vicars," he said, "and clerks dressed like laymen, laughed, shouted, and acted plays which they commonly and fitly called the Feast of Fools." They travestied the dignitaries of the church, they turned the service inside out, put obscenity for sanctity and blasphemy for prayer. While it does not appear that in England, as on the Continent,[13] the procession of the Boy Bishop was attended with frivolity or profanity, it was certainly celebrated with mummings and plays of suitable kind, not altogether serious. This ceremony dates as far back as St. Nicholas day, 1229, and was still to the fore in 1556. The Feast of the Ass appears to have been recognized by the church as early as the Feast of Fools. I do not know when it was introduced into England, but it was played upon Palm Sunday as late as the middle of the sixteenth century. In France it had been notoriously wanton since the beginning of the thirteenth; and it could not exist anywhere without promoting the spirit of burlesque and farce. Although the initial purpose of these festivals was to satirize the hierarchy and ecclesiastical convention, they applied themselves after they had been repudiated by the church to the ridicule of social folly in general; and, according to the descriptions of Warton, Douce, Hone, Klein, Petit de Julleville, and others, they came to be a vivid interpreter of the popular consciousness, a most potent educator of critical insight and dramatic instinct, an incitement to artistic even though naïve productivity. In France, indeed, the Fraternities of Fools produced national satirists and dramatic professionals in one. In England, if they did nothing else, they helped to stimulate a taste for realistic and satiric drama.

2. The Miracle Cycles in their Relation to Comedy

Miracle plays and 'marvels,' morals too as we soon shall see, were a propædeutic to comedy rather than tragedy. For the theme of these dramas is, in a word, Christian: the career of the individual as an integral part of the social organism, of the religious whole. So also, their aim: the welfare of the social individual. They do not exist for the purpose of portraying immoderate self-assertion and the vengeance that rides after, but rather the beauty of holiness or the comfort of contrition. Herod, Judas, and Antichrist are foils, not heroes. The hero of the miracle seals his salvation by accepting the spiritual ideal of the community. These plays contribute in a positive manner to the maintenance of the social organism. The tragedies of life and literature, on the other hand, proceed from secular histories, histories of personages liable to disaster because of excessive peculiarity,—of person or position. Whether the rank of the tragic hero be elevated or mean, he is unique: his desire is overweening, his frailty irremediable, or his passion unrestrained,—his peril unavoidable; and in his ruin not the principal only, but seconds and bystanders, are involved. Tragedy, then, is the drama of Cain, of the individual in opposition to the social, political, divine; its occasion is an upheaval of the social organism.

While the dramatic tone of the miracle cycle is determined by the conservative character of Christianity in general, the nature of the several plays is modified by the relation of each to one or other of the supreme crises in the career of our Lord. The plays leading up to, and revolving about, the Nativity, are of happy ending, and were doubtless regarded, by authors and spectators, as we regard comedy. The murder of Abel, at first sombre, gradually passes into the comedy of the grotesque. The massacre of the innocents emphasizes, not the weeping of a Rachel, but the joyous escape of the Virgin and the Child. In all such stories the horrible is kept in the background or used by way of suspense before the happy outcome, or frequently as material for mirth. Upon the sweet and joyous character of the pageants of Joseph and Mary and the Child it is unnecessary to dwell. They are of the very essence of comedy. The plays surrounding the Crucifixion and Resurrection are, on the other hand, specimens of the serious drama, the tragedy averted. It would hardly be correct to say tragedy; for the drama of the cross is a triumph. In no cycle does the consummatum est close the pageant of the Crucifixion; the actors announce, and the spectators believe, that this is "goddis Sone," whom within three days they shall again behold, though he has been "nayled on a tree unworthilye to die." By this consideration, without doubt, the horror of the buffeting and the scourging, the solemnity of the passion, the inhuman cruelty—but not the awe—of the Crucifixion, were mitigated for the spectators. Otherwise, mediæval as they were, they could have taken but little pleasure in the realism with which their fellows presented the history of the Sacrifice.

To indulge in a comprehensive discussion of the beginnings of comedy in England would be pleasant, but I find that I cannot compel the materials into the limits at my command. Accordingly, since the miracle cycles (to which Dodsley, following the French, gave the convenient, but un-English and somewhat misleading, name of 'mysteries') have been more frequently and generously treated by historians than those other miracles, non-scriptural, which I would call 'marvels,' and the no less important popular festival plays and early farces, and 'morals' or moral and 'mery' interludes, it seems that, in favour of the latter, I should defer much that might be said about the cycles until a more spacious occasion.

The manuscript of the York plays appears to have been made about 1430-40; that of the Wakefield, or so-called Towneley, toward the end of the same century; the larger part of the N-town, or so-called Coventry, in 1468; and the manuscripts of the Chester between 1591 and 1607. The last are, however, based upon a text of the beginning of the fifteenth or the end of the fourteenth century; and there is good reason to believe that some of the plays were in existence during the first half of the fourteenth. A tradition, suspicious but not yet wholly discredited, assigns their composition to the period 1267-76. The York cycle, according to Miss Lucy Toulmin Smith, was composed between 1340 and 1350. As to the Towneley plays, Mr. Pollard decides that they were built in at least three distinct stages, covering a period of which the limits were perhaps 1360 and 1410. While the composition of the so-called Coventry (apparently acted by strolling players) may in general be assigned to the first half of the fifteenth century, some parts give evidence of earlier date. The